This disclosure relates generally to the management and performance of integrated circuits and systems employing such integrated circuits, and in particular to balancing performance between processing elements and performing analysis of graphical applications.
Many devices such as mobile phones include graphical processing systems for presenting graphics on a display. Development of software applications for such devices is often complex and it is not uncommon to use host computer systems during the development of such programs. Such software applications, however, sometimes result in sub-optimal system performance and resource utilization. Developer tools can be used to detect such performance bottlenecks and to identify opportunities for performance optimization in application development.
To detect possible performance issues, often the developer tools execute the developed program on the target platform to determine the run-time performance/behavior of the program code. Many present-day portable device applications are graphics intensive. To accurately test the performance of such applications, it is useful to execute such applications on the device's graphical processing unit and run a measurement operation at the same to obtain data on the performance of the program. Running a measurement operation, however, can change the run-time behavior of the program it is intended to monitor. As a consequence, the “real” run-time performance of the developed programs may not be available to the program developer or development team.